The only halfway-decent excuse I’ve seen is that this is some kind of psuedo-ELO type system and that deranks stop you from riding the curtails of better players to an unearned 40 through sheer persistance.
Which if that is the reason, I can safely say the system doesn’t do a good job of measuring a single player’s skill-level. I’ve seen other folks suggest having deranks only occur if you perform poorly (Getting downed too many times) but I doubt we’d ever develop a good enough system to facilitate that.
And I don’t think preventing some snot getting 40 when they havn’t “earned” it warrants ruining the entire mode for everyone.
Hel, at this current point in time I’d say getting a group of better players willing to carry you to 40 is as much a feat as actually getting to 40. I’ve been having an awful time getting anyone to play this mode with me for more than a single match. I ain’t picky and it takes like 45+ minutes to get a single invite, and that’s faster than using the Darktide Discord’s LFG channel.
Fatshark still trying to make some kind of comp or ladder crawl happening in a game no one asked for.
This is the exact same thing they tried and failed spectacularly with Weaves in Winds of Magic, turning into a dead mode and taking 3 or more years to actually fix it.
No it means, you don’t jump to the level that was completed if your rank was lower. You only get up to +3 to rank depending on the disparity, which is fine to me but the demotion system really sucks.